Positive Usage
The expression "cult apologist" was used in a different manner than its current usage by the evangelical Christian countercult movement writer Walter Martin in 1955, in Martin's Christian handbook The Rise of the Cults. Martin used the neologism in a positive and self-referential way to identify ministries that evangelize those involved in cults. He used the term again in his next book The Christian and the Cults (Zondervan 1956, p. 6). The positive use of the term cult apologetics by evangelicals recurs in the book by Robert and Gretchen Passantino, Answers to the Cultist at Your Door and also by Alan Gomes in his contributory chapter in the first posthumous edition of Martin's The Kingdom of the Cults.
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